Sometimes I think there are two types of eaters in this world: the plate-lickers and the non-plate-lickers. The plate-lickers get enough pleasure out of each iiiitty bitty morsel of food they can scrape off their plates at the end of a meal to justify the effort; the non-plate-lickers do not. They might even think it’s unsightly to scrape your plate like that.

Yesterday I thought I was playing a sneaky trick when I asked on Facebook whether you wanted a quinoa recipe today or a cookie recipe. Usually when I do that, I’m shocked how many people choose the healthy option! But this time, a reader named Sarah saw right through me and said she wanted both. Well, in fact, that’s exactly what I was going to do either way.

Because I made quinoa cookies!

Quinoa cookies?!?!

Quinoa cookies. Don’t be scared. Unless you’re scared that your inner cookie monster will come out and eat half a batch of cookie dough. In that case, you should probably run for the hills.

You know you’ve entered yuppie status when you can’t resist the Whole Foods one-day sale on champagne mangoes, and end up coming home with an entire crate.

This happened last Friday, when I ran into Whole Foods for a “few things” (always) on my way home from work, and left with $9 of mangoes. Such a sucker.

But $9 for 14 mangoes! I was both delighted with the deal and in disbelief that I was buying a crate of something just because it was on sale. Also, have I really entered the phase of my life where I stock up on whole crates of expensive produce? I might be, like, 10 years too young for that. So many emotions brought on by these mangoes. Plus, how do you use up 14 mangoes?

Where oh where do I even start this post when that big hunk of chocolate is staring me in the face?

Luckily I planned ahead enough to save myself some, so I can nibble while I think about that question.

That’s better. The worst kind of food blogging torture is trying to write a dessert post when you don’t have any left to eat. Actually… the worst food blogging torture might be dish duty. But writing about chocolate without eating chocolate is clearly high up on the list.

How about reading about chocolate without eating chocolate? Sorry about that. Not to interfere with your evening plans, but I have to say that this cake is worth rushing home after work to make. Dare I say it’s even worth skipping the gym to rush home and make? I have, on occasion, been known to cancel my evening exercise plans for a reeeeally good-looking chocolaty dessert recipe. Not that I think you would ever sink to that level… but if you would consider it, now should be the time.

You may recall from my recipe fails post the sunflower seed butter cookies I tried to make last year. The ones that turned green.

Accidental green cookies, no matter how delicious they taste, are a fail. (And those ones didn’t taste that delicious, either.) But I still wanted to make SunButter cookies. Maybe I don’t learn from my mistakes? But maybe I do, because in this case I learned that baking soda was the culprit – it reacts with the chlorophyll in the sunflower seeds to cause that, um, interesting green color.

The solution was obviously to just leave out the baking soda. Enter three-ingredient SunButter cookies!